In quest of next ecosystem superstars — last year’s review, vision for future and new CEO announcement
The author, Harri Iisakka, is the new CEO of Wave Ventures, the Nordics’ first and Europe’s leading student-run VC. Outside VC, he is excited about new tech, interior design and sports in general.
Today, we will be hopping to new wave as I am be taking over Wave Ventures’ operational lead. In the future, Wave will continue backing the future star founders in their very first steps. However, prior sharing our vision for the upcoming year and team further, I would like to touch upon the past year briefly.
Exciting new investments and major steps forward in portfolio during past year
We welcomed multiple new members to our portfolio and couldn’t be more thrilled to start our co-operation with Hooked, Highkey, Starmony, and a few undisclosed investments. Additionally, it has been astounding to see the progress our older portfolio companies have made — such as Insurello raising over €7m, Blok selling its 2500th apartment and Surgify receiving sales approval for their safer bone cutting device, just to name a few examples.
Additionally, given the rotation in Wave’s investment team and part of the latest team starting in the middle of covid pandemic a year ago, the beginning was an interesting challenge to cold learn to operate in fully remote VC environment. We did well not only managing to make new superb investments and meeting awesome people, but also practicing setting the legal groundwork for an interesting project for the future — more of which TBA later.
Key focus area for the upcoming year to be even more present in Nordic university ecosystem
One of the cornerstones of Wave’s existence is to help young founders to fulfil their dreams and build their own companies. We’ll have to see how the macro-economical and general situation develops but recession and pandemic are great opportunities to start your own company. Nevertheless, the need for the help and encouragement in founding has not declined along current pandemic — vice versa.
As we see that the future solutions to today’s problems will arise from university ecosystems, we want to be present there where our future founders are. For example, Miki Kuusi of Wolt, Markus Villig of Bolt and Niklas Adalberth of Klarna all founded their companies when they were students. We want to be the first ones to support future rockstars with their early steps.
To quote Winston Churchill: “Never let a good crisis go to waste”, and we at Wave want to remain curious — yet professional — in making the most out of these extraordinary times. We want to make sure to remain at our roots while continuing our journey in helping young bold minds in achieving their dreams. Even though Wave has been roaring for 5 years this year, the fundaments in our operations have not changed (yet multiple lesson have been learned on the way, luckily).
Networks, teamwork and curiosity form our core value-add to founders in the future as well
- Networks and active co-operation with other players from the ecosystem
Wave’s networks are one of its kind given its structure being a student-run VC. The networks don’t only limit to the best university student pool (your future co-founders or team members) or successful entrepreneurial superstars (advisors) but also include strong ties to other ecosystem projects such as Slush. Personally, I’ve been previously part of Slush, Kiuas, Junction and Aaltoes, so I want to make sure that we — Wave and you — can utilize other brilliant minds from the ecosystem to excel.
2. High-quality team work combined with relentless can-do attitude
Wave will continue to operate as a one big team in the future. Yes, that may sound like a cliché but giving my background in playing ice hockey competitively in the Junior Finnish Elite league for several years, I want to ensure that the drive for fluent and motivated team work remains the same — no matter the field. In practice, Wave team is ready to tackle both our investment team’s and our portfolio companies’ burning issues ranging from high-level sparring to more hands-on help.
3. Curiosity to learn and challenge from fresh perspectives
In essence, being a part of Wave is about dying to want to learn more and more. The hungry mindset is, on its part, a factor providing new, outside-of-the-box ideas for any discussion. In addition to digesting industry-related knowledge on daily basis, we try to challenge ourselves in the more academic field as well. For me, it means driving towards double degree in Aalto University. Wave offers a great platform to put, for example these, learnings into actual use in the most various and inspiring environment.
Concluding, I am thrilled to give a kick-start to the new wave as CEO. However, the quest of next brilliant founders continues so without further ado let’s crack whatever comes in the way and have fun doing it!
Always love a good discussion so come to say hi👋🏼 at harri {at} wave.ventures, or follow @waveventures and @iisakkaharri on Twitter! Additionally, go to wave.ventures to learn more about our awesome founders and the whole team.
